Many Americans today are doubly distressed. First, the obvious setback to a “normal” life in a free country are the Government lockdowns to defeat COVID-19. Second, the impending November election in a very badly divided country forcing a choice between the extremist views of the two leading candidates. Both candidates exhibit seemingly less in leadership qualities than what is truly needed.

We need not dwell extensively on the rank statements of the current President and his frequent feuds with the media nor on the rather strange remarks of the likely Democratic nominee. We merely observe that either candidate is likely to heighten the distress of Americans who believe in limited but cooperative government that is nonpartisan in the best sense of the term. It goes without saying that the politics of surviving the onset of COVID-19 in a meaningful way has been hardly nonpartisan. The “helicopter money” approach so far provided is an effort largely devoted to political optics not economics. To state the obvious in a country that needs to go back to work: does it make sense to pay an unemployed worker more to stay unemployed than to have that worker gainfully and permanently employed even at a lower wage? That is what both parties agreed to under the duress of the Virus War. It is not a tribute to rational government policy. It is a device used by both parties to appear to get something done when they fail to agree on an overriding strategy.

On the other side of the coin are the efforts of the Federal Reserve to operate a monetary regime that is as much fiscal as it is monetary policy. The Fed is “applauded” by both parties but the larger term components of massive Fed intervention in the debt markets are left relatively unexplored. The most recent is the Fed’s deployment of buying privately issued loans to unrated public and private companies.¹ It is at best an experiment, but it takes our central bank far beyond anything ever contemplated or truly understood as central banking policy measures.

“Do Something Now” is the ruling guidelines of American politicians of all stripes. This is an optics game not a well-engineered policy strategy with appropriate cost-benefit qualifications. It also runs the risk of saddling the country with a monumental debt overhang without necessarily providing the economics of sustainable growth to liquidate that debt. World War II aviators often spoke of flying back from their missions holding their damaged planes together with “chewing gum and baling wire.” That was a necessity.

Flailing government policy to fight the Virus War is surely not optimal policy, but when the politicians have dramatically different purposes for Government, that is what you get. One can only hope that the State does not run out of gum!

“A republic if you can keep it,” as Benjamin Franklin once said, but can we keep it in a war where the politicians do not agree what kind of government we should have?² One side clearly believes in throwing massive amounts of money out from a vast armada of currency-laden helicopters is a solution while the other side fears that the present economy cannot recover under the set of disincentives now or likely to be established.

Next comes the Presidential and Congressional Elections. What can we expect from such a contest in which each side has assembled a set of Generals to run the war with totally divergent strategies? One is reminded of Lincoln’s three-year struggle with inadequate military leaders until Grant proved willing and able to defeat the Confederacy? Then the country had a national purpose and a leader whose unifying principle was to save the Union. Can we expect the same in November? On the basis of the evidence so far, it seems highly unlikely. Both presumed candidates have waffled on a “needed national purpose.” Both are frightened by health and medical experts whose own models of the pandemic have given and still give conflicting predictions about the course of the Virus War.

Good strategy in war begins with a defined objective and a multiplicity of tactics evaluated with common tools. It is impossible to discern the strategy of each party or its presumed candidate at this point. One observes such a variety of changing tactics that hardly any military historian would infer a high likelihood of success. STUMBLECONOMICS might be a better description of either Party’s strategy?

Like Lincoln, we are still looking for our General.

1. The Main Street New Loan Facility, authorized under Section 13(3) of the Federal Reserve Act, can purchase loans in a SPV made to all kinds of businesses including corporations, partnerships, LLC’s, trusts, associations, cooperatives, and joint ventures or tribal businesses, where the initial lender is a financial intermediary that will take a minority risk interest in the loan. [↩]
2. Quoted in Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2003), 459. [↩]